Does Your Org Design Drive or Dam the Flow of Strategy?

Why do so many brilliant strategies fail?

The problem usually isn't the vision. It's the gap between strategy and execution.

In this episode of LeadershipSOPs, executive coach and organizational strategist Ed Tyson explores one of leadership's biggest blind spots: why organizations often invest enormous effort creating winning strategies but fail to redesign the people, processes, structures, and capabilities required to bring those strategies to life. Through compelling analogies from championship sports teams, military operations, and corporate leadership, Ed demonstrates why today's plays simply can't be run from yesterday's formations.

Ed explains that strategy alone is only a milestone, not the destination. True strategic leadership requires intentionally connecting vision to execution by designing an operating model capable of delivering the desired outcome. He introduces his practical WORK Framework, helping leaders evaluate Work Methods & Tools, Organizational Structures, Rewards & Recognition Systems, and Knowledge & Capabilities to ensure every part of the organization supports the mission.

Listeners will also learn Ed's straightforward three-step Work Assessment process for evaluating organizational readiness, aligning leadership teams around a compelling case for change, developing strategic design options, and building transition plans that reduce friction while increasing organizational performance. Whether you're leading a department, a growing company, or a global enterprise, these practical frameworks can help you transform strategy from a PowerPoint presentation into measurable business results.

Throughout the conversation, Ed challenges leaders to think beyond organizational charts and instead focus on creating systems that align people, processes, incentives, technology, and capabilities with strategic priorities. Because the strongest strategy in the world will fail if the organization isn't designed to execute it.

If you're responsible for driving change, leading transformation, or improving organizational performance, this episode delivers practical leadership insights that will help you bridge the gap between strategy and execution and build an organization prepared to win before the whistle ever blows.

Enjoyed this episode? Be sure to subscribe, leave a review, and share it with someone who could benefit from the conversation.

For more leadership insights, resources, and ways to connect with Ed Tyson, visit:

Website: https://askedtyson.com

Thanks for listening, and we'll see you on the next episode.

Transcript

Speaker 0:01

If you're leading a team and you feel stuck in chaos, conflict, or constant pressure, then Leadership SOP's podcast is for you. And here's your host, Ed Tyson.

Speaker 1 0:16

Your team has already taken the field. The whistle is about to blow. But your excitement gives way to terror. What the they're lined up the same way as last week. You know it must be a mistake. They can't execute the new strategy from here. Not against this team, not in the playoffs. You wonder if it's some kind of trick. But how could it be? They just can't get there from here, not easily. And once that whistle blows, every second is going to count. The game will be afoot, and they can't afford to be even one step behind the champs. Suddenly, a timeout pulls you back from the edge of your seat. Evidently you weren't the only one panicking from the sidelines. Coaches can't run today's plays off yesterday's formations. But coaches aren't the only ones that need to transform their strategies into structure, identifying the right formations, roles, and plays to get the job done. Generals do it with battlefield models, and executives do it with operating models, flow charts, and org charts. And these artifacts are the first step to making your strategy real, to ensuring everyone is aligned and it can be manifested into the real world. In fact, an organizational chart isn't just boxes and lines dictating governance. It is a critical infographic showing the size of your force, your investment in and dispersion of talent in service of your strategies, and indicating the machinery you've built to execute it. Strategies provide intent. Structure establishes the capability. And the last thing you want is for one of your leaders to show up in front of your boss or the board, sounding like Donald Rumsfeld. Look, you go to market with the people, process, and tools you have, not the ones you might wish to have. Oof, not a good look, not at all. Do you remember that, by the way? When the U.S. Secretary of Defense said, almost exactly that? Yikes! And sadly, he wasn't talking to his superiors. Worse, it was a specialist. An army specialist early in career at a town hall QA, who just wanted to know why soldiers preparing for war were having to dig through landfills to find what they needed to keep them safe. Oof. This young man's question wasn't about politics or even blame, though it stirred up plenty of that. He wasn't questioning the mission or the strategy itself. He was questioning that tender spot right between strategy and tactics. Would it hold? Did the army have the tools and training it needed to match both the strategy and the demands of the battlefield? Sound familiar? Have you heard any town halls go like that? I certainly have. And that's why this exchange was so memorable that it's mentionable 20 years later. The strategy is approved, the objectives are clear, buy-in is not the problem. It's the space between, the space between the new strategy and the old tactics and tools. They rarely bond without attention, causing them to rip open under pressure, revealing painful but preventable gaps, and trumpeting out the noise before defeat. Today's brilliant strategy defeated by yesterday's methods and tools. One thing's for sure, Donald Rumfeld was speaking the truth when he said you go to war with the army you have, not the one you wish to have. Or at least it was some truth, a painful truth. He was out of options in that moment. Forward with grit was the only path available. The time for strategic preparations had passed. Hello and welcome back to the Leadership SOPs podcast. I'm Ed Tyson, executive coach, organizational consultant, and author. And I created the Leadership SOP's methodology, framework, and digital platform to get leaders into action on the work and in the process of leading. And I created this show, the Leadership SOPs Podcast, specifically for you, for us to discuss the challenges and complexities of enterprise leadership, highlighting the insights and the repeatable routines that can help you and your leaders structure, operate, and perfect your communities of effort. Last week, we cracked open the ubiquitous term strategy and what dimensions a good strategy rests upon. But we left the episode on a cliffhanger of sorts, having explored the metaphysical structure, the why, what, and how, which binds a community of effort together, but without discussing how to translate that metaphysical meaning into a physical reality. This is our job today, here on the Leadership SOP's podcast, strategy. The word itself gets a lot of attention, but developing strategies is neither where getting strategic begins nor where it ends. Throwing a new strategy at a human system is like throwing a wrench into a whirling machine. Someone is gonna get hurt. For example, consider a manufacturing company moving to a new connected device with a powerful data strategy behind it, but absent the data privacy capabilities, the data privacy people, process, and technology needed to deliver it legally to your biggest market. Like a powerful locomotive slamming into the walls of a tiny tunnel, it's going to be a train wreck. Because, particularly in Europe, your data strategies cannot be stronger than your data privacy capabilities. Not only will you smash into the mountain, you likely won't have even deployed the experts you need to tell you it's there. A strategy is conceptual. Your marketplace is real. Your customers and competitors are real. Your strategy simply won't stand up without the right structure. No doubt, strategy is an important waypoint. You have almost no shot at success without it. But it is only a milestone on the journey to being more strategic. We leave too much undone and potentially in the way if we simply point to the strategy and fire the starting pistol. Ironically, that wouldn't be strategic at all. In truth, once you have devised your scope, your strategies, your highest level how, you need to tether it to the real world with connective tissue, your work design. Input, throughput, output, roles, incentives, and skills. All of it. All of it has to match the strategy. You can't change the strategy without changing, or at the very least, assessing the work design. At least not if you expect to succeed. To be clear, I don't mean jumping all the way to individual tactics, not yet. I mean a layer above that, between the strategic high-level how and that tactical, exactly how. That's where your work design lives. That's your work methods and tools, organizational structures, rewards and recognition systems, and knowledge and capabilities required to pursue the strategies and deliver the culture, objectives, and purpose as demanded by your ecosystem. You might use different words like recalibrating your operating model, reviewing your process and roles, but I like work as an acronym standing for work, methods and tools, organizational structures, reward and recognition systems, and knowledge and capabilities. Organizational design is another term you might have heard to describe these dimensions. However, I use that Work acronym because without fail, when you say organizational design, many leaders will jump to boxes and lines and miss the opportunity to rethink the work itself, how it is received, who receives it and completes it, and where it goes when it's done. But when you call it a work design, it's hard to miss the point, isn't it? Now, how do you do this work is the question. Who do you do it with? Let's quickly run through my skinny-down version of the work assessment SOP I've used to reenvision nearly every major organizational function. Step one, draft and align on a case for change and a design process. Step two, develop high-level options. And step three, select options and devise a detailed design and transition plan. Pretty simple. But everything seems simple when you're flying that high. So let's walk through some of the details to level set. Step one, I divide that into two parts. First, there's the drafting, and then there's the aligning on the case for change and the design process itself. That's where you're kind of planning to plan. How are we going to approach this? To create the draft, I review my approved scope, my strategies, culture, and business objectives, purpose statement, and ecosystem assessment. This time, with the specific lens of thinking through friction points between the scope and the current work design? Can the current design deliver the new strategy? I start with the W and ask, do the work methods and tools need to change? Will pursuing the strategies or achieving the objectives they contemplate challenge the current process, work capacity, prioritization schemas, handoffs, or technology? Will they exacerbate current intra or interdepartmental friction or create new work and unmitigated risks? Then I move to the O in that work acronym and ask, what about the organizational structure supporting those methods and tools? Do roles and responsibilities need to be recalibrated, expanded, contracted? Will decision making and authority need to shift downward or include new stakeholders? Will our current geographic allocations be stable? Or will people need to be shifted to new or changing opportunities? Do I need a division structure which gives my leaders direct access to a full cadre of experts, putting cost at a premium but selecting for customization at the site of service? Or do I need a functional structure to develop deeper subject matter expertise and agility, but at a lower price point? Then I hit the R for rewards and recognition systems and ask myself whether the current systems select for the right behaviors. And lastly, K for knowledge and capabilities. Are they shifting? Do I need a different type of resource? Or resources with new skills? The answers to these questions drive my case for change, including any and all strategic impacts I've been able to uncover in this quick process, informing draft design principles, the strategic criteria for how the current design should be fortified, and culminating in any likely high-level options which might respond to the design principles I've noted. Now, given this draft, this straw man, I propose a process and participants that make sense, defining those who will both engage with me to create design options and those who are needed to approve it. And then I align with my boss and any other executive stakeholders we think need to be engaged, particularly determining whether and when we might need to include any specialized human resources, labor management, or legal support. Coming out of step one, I've essentially got a straw man work assessment, a design process, and alignment on both. The three critical things I need to engage stakeholders without killing my chances for success with a false start, lost trust, or credibility. As step two kicks off, I engage the predetermined design team to help develop high-level options. Basically, we go about the same process I use to create the straw man assessment, but this time with the added rigor that comes with examining current state artifacts and perspectives shared within a broad group. You'll be ready for step three, selecting options and devising a detailed design and transition plan when your high-level options and their likely impacts are well understood and ready for senior stakeholder consideration. This final step includes a lot of work that can't be easily articulated out of context in a discussion like this one, because it includes not just selecting the high-level direction, but also aligning on a process for getting to a detailed design and that transition plan to it, both of which could have deep implications on the organization's cost structure, technologies, and the number and types of positions you will have. Often, this work is done with a smaller design team than the initial one, and with support from HR and maybe even some legal experts, depending on the depth of the changes and impacts. So to recap, it's really just one, two, three. Draft an align on a case for change in a design process, develop high-level options, and then select from those options and devise a detailed design and transition plan. Now, if you're interested in a slightly more detailed version of that same SOP, you'll find it in the Leadership SOPs app. Regardless of how your leaders do this work though, and what adjustments you might make to this SOP, the point is you've really got to do it. And if you want to help your leaders be more strategic, walk them through it. Help them understand what that word strategic really means. Make sure they know being strategic means zooming out, assessing the ecosystem, clarifying the purpose, defining objectives, considering the culture, and then establish winning strategies and connecting those strategies to execution by designing the engine that will do it, assessing the work methods and tools, pressure testing the organizational structure, recalibrating rewards, and clarifying the knowledge and capabilities, the strategy and the design require. This is what being more strategic means, much more. For your strategy to stand, it must have structure, or it will fail to operate when the whistle blows. And speaking of operating your community of effort, that is exactly where we're going, deep diving into how your leaders can set the pace with the right planning, accountability, and stakeholder engagement SOPs. Next on the LeadershipSOps Podcast. Thank you for joining me today. Make sure you subscribe so you never miss a thing. And as always, lead on.

Speaker 17:02

So that's it for today's episode of LeadershipSOPs. Head on over to Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen and subscribe to the show. One lucky listener every single week that posts a review on Apple Podcasts will win a chance the grand prize drawing to win a $25,000 value VIP Day with Ed Tyson's stuff. Be sure to head on over to leadershipsopspodcast.com and pick up a free copy of that gift. And join us next time.